
Part 3: "The Sense of Human Dignity", §5 (p. 61)
Science and Human Values (1956, 1965)
IV, 45
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book IV
Part 3: "The Sense of Human Dignity", §5 (p. 61)
Science and Human Values (1956, 1965)
[2012, Echoes of Perennial Wisdom, World Wisdom, 17, 978-1-93659700-0]
Spiritual path, Virtue
Source: The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), Ch. IV, p. 61
Source: Mind is a Myth (1987), Ch. 4: There Is Nothing To Understand
Context: If you are freed from the goal of the "perfect","godly", "truly religious" then that which is natural in man begins to express itself. Your religious and secular culture has placed before you the ideal man or woman, the perfect human being, and then tries to fit everybody into that mold. It is impossible. Nature does not exist at all. Nature is busy creating absolutely unique individuals, whereas culture has invented a single mold to which all must conform. It is grotesque.
Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)
Context: What happens when a new work of art is created, is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.
“Action: the Perfection of Human Life,” Sewanee Review, LVI (Winter, 1948), pp. 3-4.